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Johnny J. wrote: I started when computers were - if not in their infantry - then at least quite new.
Computers had foot-soldiers? And there was me thinking that Skynet was fiction. 
Or did you mean infancy?
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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Would you believe me if I claimed that I did that on purpose to see if anybody would notice?
Anyway, that's my story and I'm sticking to it... 
Speeling error fixed btw!
Anything that is unrelated to elephants is irrelephant
Anonymous
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The problem with quotes on the internet is that you can never tell if they're genuine
Winston Churchill, 1944
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I'd just like a chance to prove that money can't make me happy.
Me, all the time
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There is a near-irresistible temptation to answer many questions there with "Perhaps you should look for another line of work"....
...but I do blame this plethora of "black box" solutions - particularly JavaScript frameworks - which enable people to do a lot without any real understanding of what they are actually doing. Of course, you can argue that anything above assembly language programming is "black box" programming, but still...
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart." - Linus van Pelt.
"If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't think you were so smart!" - Charlie Brown.
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It is not just IT, it is any industry I would think, the current mentality of the 'yoof' (I'm generalising here, so not all of them!) is "I want to be taken by the hand and shown what to do or have it written down step by step so I don't have to learn anything, oh, and I want a higher salary than you are paying me because my colleague (with 25yrs experience who has learnt the hard way and knows a damn site more) is on more than me"...
When I hear, "I haven't had any training on that" for something you could work out yourself if you were to apply yourself, is boils my pi$$.
/endrant
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It is started with the 'Teach yourself ... in 21 days' and went on with '... for Dummies'...
There is (a Microsoft lead) line, that all you need to became a developer is to buy one of those books and the magically-super IDE of your choice...
So youngsters are believe, that you can do it without learning...All you need a some cut-and-paste work - the glue is at CP for free...
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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Unfortunately, it isn't just would-be developers who think the job is just cut and paste... many clients seem to think the same! 
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart." - Linus van Pelt.
"If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't think you were so smart!" - Charlie Brown.
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From the point-of-view of the client - as long as it works with bearable amount of failures...
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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I would be happy if any (!!!) of these kids had read some stuff of that quality ONCE!!!
Press F1 for help or google it.
Greetings from Germany
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I believe, you didn't touched then a long time...Two decades ago these were good sources, written by people with knowledge...today these are written to fulfill the demand by people, who learned and gathered experience from books only...
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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Too true, I started with one of the 'Teach yourself ... in 21 days' books... luckily I was VERY young (pre high-school) and always believed that I should get a formal education in Computer Science before really be able to say I can progra.
Those books are cancer.
GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP. -- TNCaver
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Anecdote: Horrible but true.
Many years ago (decades) I got a book with a title (aprox) Teach Yourself Visual Studio Database Program in 21 day. I needed a rapid bootstrap. Since I had zero knowledge at the time, it seemed good and had FoxPro example I could follow. This, by the way, was chosen in an actual book store!
Well - it did get me going with FoxPro tables - and interestingly, since that was what the company I was working for used, it did its job.
Due to latency problems, it became necessary to switch to SQL Server - which was a whole different game vs. the viewable editable text files that made a FoxPro table. The book seemed to not have any help at all. Since email existed, I was able to email the author and ask him what I need to do to access other databases. I couldn't seem to find it in his book. Eventually, the reply came back: he didn't know how to, either.
So, the author of a book that proclaimed "Database" programming was hardly able to throw together a book on a single database and knew nothing about anything beyond it.
I never got another one of these junk-boxes, again, not even when they were tempting like Learn SQL Server in 24 Hours.
As a side-note: I've never even let a For-Dummies book touch my skin. The title's implication made such a move, especially if voluntary, a supreme lack of self esteem.
| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error." - Weisert | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Because developing anything, not restricted to software, is a farking tough job. Only the clever and intelligent people, or the medium-gifted but headstrong ones can succeed.
This limits the number of prospective software developers, while the industry asks for more and more while pushing on the market black box solutions which allow monkeys to write something capable to be executed, which hardly defines as a program. Coupled with the "Computer Science is easy, you should see what my son can do" attitude of many people who are used to see the computer as Word+Facebook means that there is no knowledge on how to select IT people.
Add the fact that Computer Science appeals many people because "it's easy" (I saw many young guys enroll in Technical High Schools for Computer Science convinced that they would learn how to use Word and Windows) and then must survive... and you have the recipe for the total state of disaster our industry is in now.
GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP. -- TNCaver
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because many of the newbees hadnt read any book like ".. for Dummies" oder "Teach in ... 21 days".
Maybe cp should make some basic teaching areas for the next generation of coders 
Press F1 for help or google it.
Greetings from Germany
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KarstenK wrote: Maybe cp should make some basic teaching areas for the next generation of coders
It does - see 'Learning Zones' on the home page...
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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Because businesses think that anyone can churn out code for them, at the lowest cost. And educational establishments are employing similarly cheap lecturers who learn as they teach, i.e. badly. My son works on building/fixing websites, and says the most frustrating aspect is the number of business people who come up with impractical ideas and expect them to be implemented at virtually no cost.
Outsourcing may have saved money, but it has done more harm than good.
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Let me tell you a story that happened to me, as it is instuctive. Picture me, a handsome idealistic young dev (OK, just the last one) making my way through university. Courtesy of the BCS the course has a mandatory "group project" element, sadly. The groups are divided along exam result lines - two people expected to get distinctions*, two people expected to fail and about 6 in-betweeners, this seemed to be par for the course. Anyhoo- my team progressed as you'd guess - the distinction-bound did most of the coding the in-betweeners did some coding, styling and organisation of rooms etc, the ones failing barely involved themselves.
But wait I here you wail, this is the ballad of Mister X - where is he? We shall lay our scene in a music-room, where the first meeting was held. We divided work into as reasonable chunks as we could, Mister X said he had mad Flash skillz and offered to do some nice front end work and animations for our site. Mister X smiled a smile the Cheshire cat would have been proud of. Imagine, if you will, it is now two-days before submission, and the final meeting is being held. Despite several attempts, Mister X had been uncontactable fir weeks, but he'd finally turned up. We asked him for the flash to plug into our page. Nothing. Nada. Nowt. He "hadn't had time" - this went down well with the main devs, who's put in 100+ hours each over the previous 2-3 weeks to produce a working site. We later found out he'd gone on holiday back to Hong-Kong, whence he hailed. He received a grade of 2% of the overall effort of the team when this was divided up.
Fast forward 10 years. You humble correspondent, now broader of beam and thinner of hair, is a senior developer in a financial institution. And we are hiring .net developers. We see a few candidates and put them through a developer test. One particularly promising candidate is a fellow senior dev in Midlands-based building society. I was called in to review the code (in truth, 'twas I who helped devise the test) and the code was woeful. The task was broken down into steps (e.g. read a file, process) but there was no attempt at OO. The code was entirely disjointed - nothing was making it hang together each step was isolated, but not in a good way - all within a single procedure. Worse the code style was all over ye-shoppe. Naming conventions differed, part K&R, part c# standard layout, at one point a variable was named something completely irrelevant to the problem. How could this be? We had a senior dev in for interview. I checked the browser history. The senior dev had googled each step, copied and pasted, and had not the wit to even cobble it together. I've seen undergrads produce better.
My boss and I went in to the room where he was waiting, to basically tell him not to darken our doors (OK provide feedback). His face was familiar, but I couldn't place him. Then the Cheshire-Cat grin appeared, at least until he realised who I was and the gig was up.
tl:dr; chumps remain chumps, even if they have relatively successful careers.
* Curiously this was a poor strategy. There were a couple of groups who had people in the top category who'd worked extremely hard but -even by their own admission- couldn't code for toffee and their teams actually struggled to produce a working bit of software
[Edit]
I don't English very well - fixed the most egregious examples of this.
modified 9-May-16 6:45am.
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On a related note, when I was at school, French was compulsory - and I was rubbish at it, and so in the bottom stream. Came the exams...
One exam was oral dictation: the teacher would read a passage in French and we had to write it down under exam conditions. One point per correct word, one deducted for each missed or misspelled word.
Half the class did not attend for the exam, and were given zero. Which meant they passed it as the rest of us got nowhere near that high a score...
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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I remember my French Oral, we knew we would be asked to talk 'with' the teacher on one of three subjects. I just learnt by rote five minute talks on each. The oral was around 15 minutes and after the introduction and being told what to do, there was barely five minutes left. I started jabbering away about 'le camping' and he didn't get a word in edge ways until the time was up.
Grade 1 CSE *ker-ching*
veni bibi saltavi
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On my oral French, I didn't know the subject beforehand. When I got in, I drew "haute couture" - Yeah, like I would know jack about that. Still managed to somehow get a good score, though. Still to date don't know how...
Anything that is unrelated to elephants is irrelephant
Anonymous
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The problem with quotes on the internet is that you can never tell if they're genuine
Winston Churchill, 1944
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I'd just like a chance to prove that money can't make me happy.
Me, all the time
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OriginalGriff wrote: Half the class did not attend for the exam, and were given zero. Which meant they passed it as the rest of us got nowhere near that high a score...
Attending the exam and failing vs. bunking and passing
But seriously, how can you pass an exam that you didn't take?  In India, that's as bad as a fail.
Cheers,
विक्रम
"We have already been through this, I am not going to repeat myself." - fat_boy, in a global warming thread 
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in a previous work we also devised a test for new hires.
Given, an empty winforms project and a text file with some text.
In a timespan of 30-45 minutes the test subject had to read in the text file, convert each other letter to uppercase and display it in text box.
Extra points for adding a progressbar and the time the conversion took.
So you read the resume and it says ".net certified" or something similar. The code produced after about 60 minutes: 4 lines, with 2 lines of those in comment.
I even had one who replied "I don't know" when I asked him what ".net certified" meant.
So yes, there are those guilty of many a 1D10T errors in tha brain 
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V. wrote: I even had one who replied "I don't know" when I asked him what ".net certified" meant.
The correct answer is obvious: Absolutely nothing. 
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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On my most recent employment interview, I was asked to do something very similar. It was a first for me, I had never had to do a practical programming test before, so I was actually scared shitless (until I saw the tasks). I was allowed to Google, but never did. Had 4 hours in which to complete the tasks, did it in 1½.
The bosses were mighty impressed. They told me after I got the job that they had had a lot of people fail to produce anything. I was REALLY surprised, because it was SO basic, and I had done similar tasks a million times before.
Anything that is unrelated to elephants is irrelephant
Anonymous
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The problem with quotes on the internet is that you can never tell if they're genuine
Winston Churchill, 1944
-
I'd just like a chance to prove that money can't make me happy.
Me, all the time
modified 9-May-16 9:52am.
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ha, I was surprised at the results too. Those who get it done, do so pretty quick, those who take too long, usually don't produce anything...
(PS: Our google and MSDN where also enabled so looking up was also possible)
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Because we are in the Kali Yuga, the final, fourth stage, of the cosmic cycle, where Goddess Kali presides over an exponential increase in entropy as apocalypse nears ?
Because we live in a cut-and-paste world where nothing is original ?
Because human nature includes stupidity, overweening pride, and greed ?
Because thousands of sheeple follow digital shepherds who feed them pixellated grass ?
Because we are old, and tired, and enjoy forgetting when we were young, and brash, and our confidence exceeded out abilities by a macroscopic margin ?
Bill
«There is a spectrum, from "clearly desirable behaviour," to "possibly dodgy behavior that still makes some sense," to "clearly undesirable behavior." We try to make the latter into warnings or, better, errors. But stuff that is in the middle category you don’t want to restrict unless there is a clear way to work around it.» Eric Lippert, May 14, 2008
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